On the Personal Experience of the Catholic Sacraments

 

 

Last time, I spoke of the crucial need to clarify and illumine the Living Mystery of the Church. For the Catholic Mystery is ever-more effaced by the currents of the Modern Age, in the post-Protestant countries, above all.

Now, this concern also forms one of several, interlocking themes in my upcoming book [Update – now published and available here as Cor Jesu Sacratissimum].

Within the course of my manuscript, I try to approach the Living Mystery of the Church from a variety of different angles. But one of these angles, at least, was fairly unusual and quite difficult. Indeed, it was so much so that I asked myself whether I should excise my stammering efforts to express it from my manuscript.

But truly the need to speak of this Living Catholic Mystery, the Living Organism of the Church appears so pressing to me, so truly urgent, that I am loathe to delete even this odd, tentative effort.

And so it happens that I have not only retained it within the book’s manuscript  – but feature some of it here as a weblog entry:

I want to suggest more in terms of the interior experience of the Catholic Sacraments. Yet such testimony of personal Sacramental experience is far from easy. Indeed, it seems to me that I may manage to do little more than stammer before these almost indescribable matters.

Still as I said before, contemplative attention towards the action of the Church in one’s inner life may lead to important, even life-changing, insight.

Certainly, I declare that my own ongoing participation in regular confession and daily communion involves feeling enlivened, succoured, helped in profound, indescribable ways by these Sacraments. I depend on them day-in, day-out.

But there is still more to be found, when one turns one’s attention inward and contemplates one’s inner experience in connexion with the Sacraments.

At least, it seems to me, that if a person tries to pay careful attention to his internal world, one may notice subtle yet obvious sensations in connexion with the Sacramental life.

Such may become particularly evident when the rhythm of daily Sacraments is broken – for example due to illness.

For if the regular Mass-goer pays inward attention to his own personal life experience while receiving the Catholic Sacraments daily and then compares that with his experience of a few days deprived of the Sacraments, a real difference may become strikingly apparent to him!

At least, this testifies to how I myself have approached the Sacraments for more than a decade now. It is from the inward attention of years that I stammer of these subtle yet clear sensations in regards to the Sacramental life.

For I find myself with a set of subtle, yet repeated, familiar and precious experiences – which are admittedly very hard to name.

Although there have been times when the interior sensation is not so subtle. At times, there has been a distinctly palpable sense of a difference in my soul, even for hours after receiving the Sacraments.

Yet how to convey all this in words? Part of the problem here involves the fact that this delicate Sacramental experience is unlike anything, which I knew outside of the Church.

That is to say, it has no parallels with my life-experience prior the Church, when I lived comfortably and ignorantly in the secular and New Age worlds. And it seems to me that most, if not all people in these worlds may have no parallel to the experience that I struggle to communicate here.

In other words, those who know the Sacraments may understand what I mean; with those who do not know, communication may be impossible.

To risk an analogy, which is all-too-mundane, how would you express the sensation of ‘appleness’ to someone who had never tasted an apple? Perhaps you would say that the apple is sweet; perhaps you might describe a texture that crunches, but nothing you can say will really suffice to explain the true experience of an apple’s taste.

How much more difficult it is with the subtlety of a Sacrament! The taste of an apple belongs to the external world; it is something entirely mundane by comparison with the Eucharist. One risks impiety even suggesting such a metaphor!

Still however paltry and incommensurable my analogy is, it may perhaps signal something infinitely more profound in the matter of Holy Communion.

Those who regularly receive them, or at least those who pay sufficient attention to their experience, may know whereof I speak. For those who do not, my words will be next to useless.

Still however futile the exercise, I have struggled for years to name the unnameable. Which words to employ, when all words are useless?

But over the years, one word has come to me – a word that seems to me perhaps a little useful. That word is wholesomeness – in the most beautiful sense of that term.  One may feel something subtly wholesome has been added to oneself through the Sacraments.

There is also that word peace.  In the modern liturgy, how banal these words often sound: ‘Peace be with you.’ Yet in the Peace of Christ, there is nothing banal at all …

Yes, one may feel an almost unnameable experience of wholesomeness and peace in receiving the Sacraments. The experience however is very fine and delicate, as I say.

However, one may note that the experience often becomes intensified after the reception of two Sacraments in short succession. Here I speak to the interior experience, which may be felt when Confession is followed directly by Holy Communion.

How often this impression of wholesomeness is distinctly marked then! This feeling of being cleansed by Absolution followed by the wholesomeness of His Flesh and Blood has sometimes been marked for hours afterwards. There have been times of waking the next morning and still feeling its imprint the following day.

Frequently on receiving the Sacraments, there are also important inspirations and insights. One may also feel somehow keener, more alert, particularly after the cleansing and healing of the two Sacraments together.

End of extract from my book.

 

Introductory Video from Roger Buck, author of this piece …

(And likewise the book Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, from which the above is extracted. (Please see advertisement below video.)

 

Author’s book concerning Valentin Tomberg. Click to see at Amazon.

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